My second experience with death was Optimus Prime. My fifth was Roy Fokker. The first, third, and fourth were dogs and a sibling because the universe is malicious and unfair. But the point is that while I might have read comic books or played video games, my thing that I was supposed to grow out of was giant robots. That never happened.

And so in the wake of del Toro's magnum opus of 300 foot tall robots fighting the bastard children of Godzilla and Cthulu, Gale Anne Hurd is turning her hand to the genre that no one wants to recognize as a genre (though psychologists probably have a technical term for it as a fetish). Yes one of the hands behind Terminator, Aliens, and Dante's Peak is entering the genre. Mecha-philes, this is our Batman Begins!

Here's the press release:

Gale Anne Hurd's Valhalla Entertainment ("The Walking Dead") and Toei Animation have teamed with All Nippon Entertainment Works (ANEW) to develop Toei's iconic anime property GAIKING. This marks a new push for Toei into the U.S. marketplace and the first development deal for ANEW.

GAIKING follows a young man who is recruited to serve as the lead pilot for the Super Robot Gaiking. When Earth is threatened by an alien race intent on taking over the planet, he emerges as the only one who can pilot the massive robot. Together with his fellow co-pilots he must fight off the alien force in order to save mankind.

"I'm extremely excited to be working on GAIKING," said Hurd, "which marks a huge step forward in adapting one of the best Japanese [intellectual properties] for a global audience."